Several years ago, I was speaking to a business group. The people sat in the room according to hierarchy: managers sat with the sales force in front; the administrative staff and lower echelon work force sat in back. During the Q&A, one individual from sales asked, “Don’t you think that sales should have a different set of standards than others...

Everyone’s looking for ways to improve. (Well, maybe not everyone, but most people I know.) With all the ethics scandals in the news lately, I thought I would take this opportunity to offer some ways you can improve your ethical integrity. To begin with – Ethics – writer, philosopher Ayn Rand defines ethics as “a code of values which guide our...

… you opened the morning paper and discovered there were no ethics scandals in the news? No stories about cheating, lying, broken promises, bad faith excuses; no individual fudged the numbers, misled or deceived a co-worker, family member or friend? At the end of a recent talk, one person confided, “With all the ethics scandals going on, your talk could...

Ahh, New York’s Columbia University… where the walls are ivy, the shirts are Ralph Lauren and the pedigree (alumni) includes five Founding Fathers, nine Supreme Court Justices, twenty-nine heads of state and three U.S. Presidents. It’s also where the Pulitzer Prize acknowledging excellence in journalism is administered each year. But wait, what’s this? As The New York Times reported (Dec. 3, 2006)...

The defense always seems the same. Enron’s Jeff Skilling: “I didn’t get the memo… notes… e-mails,” “I do not recall.” BP CEO Tony Hayward reacting to the worst oil spill in U.S. history: It’s “relatively tiny” compared to the “very big ocean.” Robert Murdoch tweeted: “No excuses for phone hacking. No argument. No excuses either for copyright stealing, but plenty of ignorant...

“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it.” That’s 92-year-old Hyman Strachman, a World War II vet, after spending eight years and his own money duplicating and sending thousands, according to The New York Times, (Apr. 26) “hundreds of thousands of copies of The Hangover, Gran Torino and other first-run movies from his small Long Island apartment to ship overseas.” “And,...

From January 1 to December 31, 2007 I decided to search, read and clip all the ethics-related stories I could find from The New York Times and Washington Post. The final count totaled 1,657 ethics-related stories. That’s an average of 4.5 stories per day. Looking at today’s (Apr. 26) Times and Post, here’s what I found: The Times – Fall of Chinese Official...

Should The Los Angeles Times have published photos of American soldiers in Afghanistan posing with enemy body parts? The story’s sub-head reads: “An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline.” “The Army launched a criminal investigation,” reporter David Zucchino writes, “after The Los...

You’re on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic when tragedy strikes and you’re ordered to a lifeboat. While women and children are the first priority, you hear from others that lifeboats for the men are being readied on the other side of the boat. Immediately, all the men move to the other side except you and a...

Colman McCarthy is an anarchist! He believes that teaching peace to high-school and college students will lead to – can you believe this – PEACE! And people think I’m a radical when it comes to ethics!! McCarthy and I are too oranges on a tree called Hope. In fact, Winston Churchill wrote, “All the great things are simple, and many...